


Heroes Get Remembered

by Chrononautical



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Baseball, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Ghosts, Just ignore Civil War and maybe Ultron too, things that never happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-13
Updated: 2016-10-13
Packaged: 2018-08-22 05:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8274706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chrononautical/pseuds/Chrononautical
Summary: But legends never die. The Avengers play baseball.





	

“I can’t believe this.” The faceplate on Iron Man’s helmet flipped open. Behind it, Stark’s eyes were bright, gleeful, like a kid at Christmas. Funny that, because he wasn’t the one with a trinket.

“Shut up, Tony.” Steve looked at the glowing gold medallion in his hand helplessly. These things always seemed to happen to him. A day that started with evil alien magicians terrorizing Jersey and ended with everyone making fun of him. Probably not going to go on the list of his best days ever. 

“A great and ancient talisman that allows a hero to be summoned from beyond the grave, and what happens?” 

“I wasn’t trying to use it, Stark. I just caught it. It was a reflex.” Looking to Natasha for help was useless. Her face was carefully blank. Looking to Bucky was no help either. His face was almost always expressionless. Steve needed better friends. Or at least he needed to stop being friends with the man who lived to mock everyone else. 

“That is so not the point, Captain.” Stark really shouldn’t have been able to bounce on his heels that way, not wearing that much armor. The guy was as giddy as Ebeneezer Scrooge after being visited by his ghosts.

Swooping down from the sky to flank their little group, Sam and Thor landed in the usual way. Sam stood up straight, his wings slotting away, but his fists ready for action. In contrast, Thor crouched like a cat ready to pounce, brandishing his hammer as the cape billowed dramatically behind him.

“Ho comrades! We have vanquished the sorcerer and sent him back through the tear in the fabric of existence.”

“It sealed behind him. Big woosh. Whole fireworks deal. You should have been there,” Sam said, his eyes never leaving the man outlined in golden light. “Though I see you’ve been busy here.” 

“Why have you not yet struck against this champion that the coward summoned to fight on his behalf?” Thor’s voice was low and serious, but he didn’t attack. 

“The target didn’t summon him,” Natasha said. “That was all Cap.” 

“The captain?” For the first time since his dramatic landing, Thor’s eyes darted away from the man at the center of the circling Avengers. Turning solemnly to Steve, he gave the amulet an appraising once over.

Steve felt his face turning red. “I didn’t use it on purpose.”

“No, of course not my friend!” The god’s serious countenance broke into a friendly grin. “There is no harm if the summoned hero is tied to you instead of our foe. The spell should only last until the sun sets. Indeed, it is a great honor to meet a warrior that you admire. We must seek out another glorious battle this day, so that you may know the joy of fighting at his side!” 

“He’s not that kind of hero.” Natasha smirked a little at Steve. Maybe she was rubbing it in, or maybe she was just laughing at the fact that he was embarrassed. Sometimes it was hard to tell with Nat. 

“No? His club looks mighty, though I admit his armor does not seem sufficient for battle.”

“Oy,” Steve objected, because maybe Tony wasn’t the only one with the occasional tendency to act like a kid. “Don’t knock the uniform.”

“Ah, it is a uniform? Then he is one of a legion of soldiers, like yourself?” 

Steve wanted to say yes. After all, the guy was a Navy man who’d served in the Pacific theater. They might have met there if Steve’s luck had been a little different. 

“No, no he is not,” Tony said. “That would make too much sense. And can we talk about this? I mean, we’ve all met Steve. I don’t think we were necessarily expecting Rambo or Tarzan.”

“Especially because they’re both fictional,” said Sam, always ready to honestly explain the modern world to folks who might not know what a Rambo was. 

“Did we have expectations?” Natasha’s laughing eyes shifted to Tony. At least she teased everyone equally, unlike Tony who definitely played favorites and went out of his way to make it clear that Steve wasn’t one. 

“Of course we did! Rudolf Weigl, the reason all of Cap’s friends didn’t die of typhus in the trenches, maybe. Or FDR, the president who yanked the nation out of the Great Depression. George Washington, for the guy who bleeds red, white, and blue. I don’t know, Thomas Jefferson.”

“Thomas Jefferson spent his war on the wrong side of the ocean, living like a dilettante among the French,” Steve said defensively. It was the wrong point to pick up on and he knew it. Tony wasn’t going to be side-tracked with an argument about the founding fathers. If you wanted to side track a futurist, history was never the way to go. Steve wondered what kind of hero a man like that would have summoned. Not Oppenheimer, but maybe another scientist. Someone Steve wouldn’t recognize from one of the decades he’d missed.

“FDR was okay,” Bucky said in that quiet, half surprised way he always had when he realized he had an opinion about something. 

“Whatever! Someone we would recognize. I mean, other than by the uniform.” 

“Really? You’re surprised by this?” Sam’s voice was calm and collected, but even Tony knew that Sam at his most rational was not a man to be trifled with. “You’re the one who gave him recordings of every televised game he missed. Digitally remastered for the big screen.”

Tony stopped talking. He looked at Sam.

“Do you have any idea how many times they watched the 1955 World Series?” Sam’s voice was still mild, but Steve knew that he might have preferred tuning in to a live Nationals game a little more regularly. Or anything else at all. Because Sam had said as much, and on more than one occasion.

Rubbing the back of his head, Steve turned to the illuminated man. “I am so, so sorry about this, sir.” 

“That’s, ah, that’s just fine,” he answered. “To be honest, I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. Are you really Captain America?” 

“Yessir.” 

“It’s an honor to meet you Mr. Reese,” Sam said, stepping forward to shake hands. 

“Likewise, I’m sure. Call me Pee Wee, everyone does.”

Steve did not ask if he could call the greatest baseball player of all time Pee Wee, too. That would be childish. He did manage to give the man a handshake. “I’m not, I mean, I am Captain America, yes, but also Steve. Is my name. Please call me that.” No need to turn and look, Steve could feel Tony laughing at him again.

“Nice to meet you, Steve. Sorry if it’s taking me a minute to find my feet here, but I’m a little confused. I don’t want to be blunt or anything, but I remember being older, and, well, dead.” 

“Doesn’t always take the first time,” Steve grinned. 

“That’s right. You were listed KIA years ago.” Reese looked like he was wondering if a torn up parking lot in Hoboken was more likely to be a bizarre part of heaven or a mild piece of hell. 

“Worry not about the magics that brought you here, my friend,” Thor suggested helpfully. “Know that you have been gifted with one day more among the living. Let us celebrate life before you must return to your place with the honored dead.”

Shrugging, Reese shouldered his bat. “Works for me.” Looking around at the broken asphalt one more time, he said, “If there’s an open space nearby, I wouldn’t mind playing a little ball again for old time’s sake.” Steve’s stomach flipped over. 

“Nope,” Stark said, because he lived to ruin a good time. Walking in a slow circle around the gently glowing baseball player, he poked Reese’s bat with one armored finger. “Still doesn’t work for me. Okay, the guy likes baseball. Of course he does. The list of Cap’s favorite things: baseball, mom, and apple pie. I’d understand if you were Babe Ruth or Jackie Robinson or something, but I don’t know who you are.” 

“Jackie’s a friend,” Reese said, smiling for the first time. “Is he here too?” 

“I’m sorry, sir.” Steve swallowed hard. It should have been easy. After his own experience, he should have been the natural choice to tell someone that all of their friends were dead. Luckily, Sam cut him off before he had to say anything else. 

“Really? You thought that the guy who stole home during the first game of the series would trump the hundred-and-twenty-pound-never-should-have-been-a-player shortstop who made the game winning double play in game seven?” Sam snorted and shared a judgmental look with Bucky. At least they were bonding. Over mocking Steve. 

“Hey now,” Reese objected mildly. “That was all Amoros.” 

“So humble.” Nat said. Steve wondered a little spitefully if she had any heroes, and how she would like having them paraded out in front of everyone. Of course, knowing Natasha, her hero really was more likely to be a spy than a ballerina. 

“I don’t know what any of that means,” Tony grumbled. “My sport of choice is Formula One.” 

“Ah! Midgaard sports! I find rugby quite entertaining. Lady Jane and I observed a match between two valiant bands not long ago. The victory was hard fought and well earned.” 

“Right.” Steve was absolutely done with all of his teammates. They weren’t really going to ruin this for him, and he wasn’t going to wait around for them to finish teasing. “Stark, get ahold of Vision, Wanda, Barton, and Hill. We’re going to the park.” 

“Excuse me?” Stark looked offended. Steve rolled his eyes. 

“Yes, Pepper and Rhodey can come too.” 

“And I get dibs on first base,” he insisted. “I don’t want to be stuck in the outfield staring at the clouds.”

“Fine.” Steve hid a smile. With Thor and Bucky in the batting rotation, there would be plenty for the outfielders to do. 

“Maybe I could pitch?” Bucky asked tentatively. He’d been a great pitcher when they were kids. Always picked first for any team, always put on the mound when it was just a game of pickup. Steve had been the one stuck in the outfield staring at clouds, if he was even well enough to play and Bucky made the other kids let him. Now he was asking for what had always been his by rights. At least he was asking for it. Bucky didn’t tend to ask for much since his own return to the land of the living, and he almost never phrased a request as his own desire. That hesitancy, the fact that he still clearly expected a kick for even daring to dream, made Steve wish he’d ask for something impossible, like the moon, just so Steve could get it for him. 

“If you can still get it across the plate,” Steve said, bumping his shoulder against his friend. “When was the last time you even held a baseball?” 

“More recently than you have, pal. As I recall, you couldn’t throw a strike if your life depended on it.” 

Reese grinned. “I get dibs on shortstop, right?”

“Absolutely, sir,” Steve said at once. 

“So maybe you want to take second, Cap. We can talk a little baseball while we play.”

Steve had to acknowledge the tactical superiority of that plan. Baseball in a park on a sunny afternoon with all of his friends and the greatest player who ever lived. Steve was just about ready to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, accidental magic could work out in his favor on occasion when Bucky stopped dead. Shell shock took him that way sometimes. When he had a thought or a flashback he couldn’t deal with, he tended to freeze up. “Everything okay Buck?” 

“Yes.” Bucky’s voice was completely emotionless, but his eyes were focused. That wasn’t a good sign. It often involved him getting the drop on an approaching pizza delivery driver or an unsuspecting neighbor with garden shears that Bucky saw as a weapon. “We require a baseball. I’ll handle it. What’s the location of the meet?” 

“Nope,” Sam said. “No way. I know that look. You are not breaking into someone's house to steal sports equipment. If we need a baseball I will buy a baseball. Stark! I gotta run an errand. What park did you tell the others to meet us at?” 

“Please,” Tony snorted. “Hill’s already reserved us a diamond on the Great Lawn in Central Park. She’s bringing things. Gloves and whatever else we need for baseball things. This was agreed to after a rant about how I hired her for hero stuff and not as a personal secretary, so you should be prepared for a lecture, Cap. Because I will not take the blame for your little field day.” 

“Says the man who made us do an actual field day,” Natasha muttered. 

“That was team building. That was fun.” It had been. Beating Tony in capture the flag had been particularly gratifying. 

“That was you reliving the childhood you never had,” Nat said, not letting it go. 

“Right,” Steve agreed. “So now it’s my turn. Next week we can go to the ballet.” Flinging one arm over Bucky’s shoulders and the other over Natasha’s he guided them both toward the quinjet. “Let’s play ball.” 

The grass in Central Park was greener than anything a kid from Brooklyn could have imagined in 1934. With Coulson, Sharon, and Bruce, Steve has enough friends to field two thin teams, another thing he could never have imagined as the ten year old kid who spent more time in a hospital bed listening to Dodgers games than he ever spent outside. That his friends flew and flipped as they fielded hits that would have been over the wall in any park in the country was amazing, but that they would all leave work to spend an afternoon playing ball with Steve Rogers was far more incredible. Somehow, playing on a diamond with a major leaguer was the most plausible part of the whole day, even if the player in question was long dead. It was a heck of a thing, a ghost that put others to rest. 

Plus, Pee Wee Reese high fived Steve after they made a triple play to tag out both War Machine and Thor. Steve wound up putting it on that list of good days after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Pee Wee Reese was playing for the Dodgers before Steve managed to talk his way into the army. Meaning Steve would have heard about the small man who made it big and maybe seen him play while he was still too sickly and skinny to be taken seriously. He would have respected the ballplayers who volunteered to serve in a war he was desperate to get to himself, and when he returned to the future, he would have approved of a player who went out of his way to welcome Robinson to the league. There is an aspirational aspect to personal heroes, and I think Reese fits the bill for a little guy like Steve.


End file.
